These chemicals are in the tap water of the majority of Americans, and the Trump administration could decide their fate.
No, not fluoride, the cavity-fighter that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s health secretary pick, wants out of public drinking water. Rather, they’re harmful “forever chemicals,” also known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS.
For all of Mr. Kennedy’s talk, and his contentious views on fluoride, larger battles loom over chemicals in the water we drink. Public health advocates worry that federal efforts to protect the public against PFAS and replace lead pipes could unravel under a Trump presidency.
In a landmark move earlier this year, President Biden ordered utilities to start ridding the nation’s drinking water of six kinds of PFAS, which are linked to cancer and other health risks. Chemical companies have already sued over the PFAS order, and are expected to seek a swift repeal of it from the Trump administration.
“Attacking basic fundamental protections, like the safety of people’s tap water, would be unprecedented,” said Erik Olson, who oversees environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit that sparred with the first Trump administration over policy rollbacks.
“As the public becomes aware of that,” Mr. Olson said, “I think people are going to be very upset, saying: ‘Look, I didn’t vote for toxic chemicals in my water.’”
The Biden administration, with funding under the 2021 infrastructure law, has also taken on lead, a neurotoxin that still leaches into drinking water from decades-old pipes. Last month, Mr. Biden ordered utilities to replace virtually every lead pipe in the country within 10 years, and made available billions of dollars in federal funding toward that goal.
Some experts and advocates fear that efforts to remove lead pipes could be stymied under the Trump administration, especially because its timing makes it vulnerable to a law that allows Congress to review recent rules before they go into effect.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint for the next Republican administration, vows to make the Environmental Protection Agency more open to industry science, and to defund major research into toxic chemical exposure.
During the first Trump administration, a former chemicals industry lobbyist oversaw toxic chemicals at the E.P.A., rewriting rules to make it harder to track the health consequences of a forever chemical called perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA.
The Trump campaign’s emphasis on inflation and the cost of living could also come into play, some experts said. Water utility groups have said that the cost of getting PFAS out of tap water could reach $3.2 billion a year, and that some of the cost would translate to higher water bills for the public. (Water utilities have also won billions of dollars from chemical manufacturers to pay for cleanup.)
In a statement, the American Chemistry Council, one of the groups that sued the Biden administration over the PFAS restriction, said the rule would “impact millions of ratepayers across the country and impose severe consequences on many critical stakeholders, including local governments and water agencies.”
The group added in the statement, “We will continue working with E.P.A. and other policymakers on strong, science-based regulations that protect our health and environment.”
Yet even for an incoming administration that has promised to cut costs and roll back regulations that have drawn industry ire, dismantling drinking water protections may be politically risky. In fact, the first Trump administration tentatively pursued PFAS regulation.
Mr. Trump has vowed that the United States will have the “cleanest air and water on the planet” in his second term, even as he seeks to repeal environmental regulations.
In Gallup’s annual poll tracking Americans’ views about the environment, pollution of drinking water has consistently ranked as the top environmental concern. Pollution of rivers and lakes, and contamination of soil and water by toxic waste, were other top concerns.
“We’ve seen that clean water isn’t necessarily a Republican or Democratic issue,” said Tarun Anumol, who leads PFAS testing and strategy at Agilent Technologies. “It’s always had fairly bipartisan support.”
Lee Zeldin, the former New York representative tapped to lead the E.P.A., has a record of voting for PFAS rules and other clean water regulations, in part influenced by his Long Island constituency’s struggle with the forever chemicals.
“We all have constituents who want access to clean air and clean water,” Mr. Zeldin said in 2019.
Mr. Zeldin has more recently said he would prioritize restoring U.S. energy dominance and revitalizing the auto industry, while protecting access to clean air and water, echoing Mr. Trump’s pledge.
Whether the new administration will try to stick to that promise depends on industry influence and the deference of Mr. Trump’s appointees, said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity.
Her worry, she said, was that “if Trump happens to run across someone at the Mar-a-Lago golf course who says we need to overturn regulations, there’s going to be a good chance he’ll want to overturn regulations,” she said.
Mr. Zeldin did not respond to a request for comment.
Few experts said they expected the E.P.A. under Mr. Zeldin to seek to claw back the almost $20 billion in federal funding that has been made available for Mr. Biden’s lead pipe removal drive.
Any funding not yet allocated could be paused, however, leaving states that have been slow to claim funds in the lurch, said Kevin Minoli, who worked as a senior E.P.A. lawyer from the Clinton through the Trump administrations, where he oversaw the enforcement of water regulations. The Trump administration could also heed the concerns of some districts struggling to meet the 10-year deadline, and extend the time frame, he said.
“The Biden administration didn’t want to pick which kids would get lead in their water for four more years, and which kids would get 20 years,” Mr. Minoli said. But if the deadline is allowed to slide under Mr. Trump, “then naturally, everything will take a lot longer.”
There are even larger-scale water issues at stake. Project 2025 calls for the E.P.A. to repeal the Biden administration’s Waters of the U.S. rule, which determines which bodies of water should fall under the Clean Water Act, a sweeping 1972 law that allows the agency to limit water pollution.
Project 2025 also calls for removing the “hazardous substance” designation from two kinds of PFAS chemicals under the nation’s Superfund law, which shifts the cost of toxic cleanups from taxpayers to polluters.
Often lost in the jostling over water rules are the grave consequences for health. The potent chemicals have been linked to a range of serious health conditions, including kidney and testicular cancer, thyroid disease, birth defects and fertility issues. They are also known to play a role in the contraction of common diseases like pneumonia and flu. The Biden administration’s PFAS rules mandate that utilities reduce contamination in drinking water if levels exceed four parts per trillion, the equivalent of a single drop of water in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
“We know that the type of immune suppression induced by PFAS increases people’s risks of contracting those common diseases that are a leading cost to society today,” said Jamie de Witt, director of Oregon State University’s Environmental Health Sciences Center.
“So on one hand, you might have an increase in your water bills” from a PFAS cleanup, Dr. de Witt said. “On the other hand, you might have huge increases in insurance, or just basic health care costs.”
As for fluoride, Mr. Kennedy’s musings have both elevated and muddied the debate over its health benefits and harms.
Government scientists consider adding fluoride to drinking water to be one of the 20th century’s greatest public health achievements, helping to bring about a dramatic decline in cavities and tooth decay.
More recently, there has been a shift in the debate, triggered by a mix of legitimate scientific research on fluoride’s potential harms at higher concentrations, freedom of choice concerns and conspiracy theories.
Yet water utilities are already free to stop adding fluoride to their drinking water, and about a quarter of Americans already drink water with no added fluoride.
If the Trump administration were to force utilities to defluorinate tap water, it would need to work through the E.P.A., not the Department of Health and Human Services, where Mr. Kennedy is set to take the helm.
Such a move would require a yearslong rule-making process. This would be a misuse of the E.P.A.’s resources, critics said, at a time when the nation’s drinking water faces emerging threats, like Legionella bacteria, nitrates and thousands of yet-unregulated PFAS chemicals.
“If we got to that point,” said Ms. Burd of the Center for Biological Diversity, “there’s no reason to think it will be anything other than herky-jerky and chaos.”
The post Trump Promises Clean Water. Will He Clean Up ‘Forever Chemicals’? appeared first on New York Times.
